In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings

I could not get as excited as some by Stephen Adly Guirgis's Jesus Hopped The 'A' Train when it showed last year at the Donmar. But, although I have yet to be convinced he is a major talent, this earlier play shows a compassion for the deadbeat denizens of New York's Hell's Kitchen that surpasses anything in its noisier successor.

In a sense Guirgis is harking back to the abiding theme of American drama: the conflict between dreams and reality. Set in and around an 8th Avenue bar during Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's '90s gentrification, the play deals with a group of fantasising no-hopers. Chickie and Skank, a pair of crackheads, dream of getting to Baltimore to hang out with a famous actor. Charlie, a retarded barman, sees himself as a Jedi fighter from Star Wars. And Demaris, a 17-year-old apprentice hooker, craves security for herself and her baby. But, in a world of zero tolerance, their illusions are as ripe for demolition as the dilapidated bar.

Guirgis, in the tradition of Tennessee Williams, combines sympathy for the walking wounded with a sharp humour. In the play's best scene Lenny, a chicken-hearted hoodlum, goes for an unlikely job interview as an on-site field marketeer which actually involves handing out flyers. And Guirgis's astute observation shows itself in a bar room barter between a gay estate agent and Skank, who is obliged to supply sexual favours to feed his own desolate habit.

But at the heart of the play lies a strange contradiction. Guirgis clearly resents the Disneyfication of the Times Square area and the makeover of the bar itself with its 1937 antique oak. At the same time he paints a sad picture of the dreamland inhabited by his drunks, druggies and small-time punks. In consequence, it is hard to know why we are expected to mourn the passing of a world full of private anguish and even deadly danger for the hookers at the mercy of their more evangelical clients.

Robert Delamere's production camouflages Guirgis's intellectual confusion by opting for a tone of plangent lyricism. There is an outstanding performance from Ashley Davies as a quivering crackhead and good ones from Tom Hardy as her debilitated partner, Gerald Lepkowski as a gentle giant of a barman, and Garfield Morgan as a moist-eyed toper for whom the iceman clearly cometh. But while Guirgis shows commendable generosity of spirit towards his dreaming dossers, he never manages to persuade us that the clean-up of New York's more hellish precincts is an act of civic vandalism.

· Until May 17. Box office: 020 7722 9301

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